Quotes from Sarah Dessen

You can't measure love by time put in, but the weight of those moments. Some in life are light, like a touch. Others, you can't help but stagger beneath.

What were you two talking about? she whispered as Wes pulls the door shut. Nothing, I said. Running. You should have seen your face, she said, her breath hot in my ear. Sa-woooon.

It hadn't even occured to me that somebody would believe mine.

So what do you wear to dump somebody? she asked me, twirling a lock of hair around one finger. Black, for mourning? Or something cheerful and colorful, to distract them from their pain? Or maybe you wear some sort of camouflage, something that will help you disappear quickly in case they don't take it well.

In the end, though, maybe it's not how you reach a place that matters. Just that you get there at all.

She stroked my hair and told me I was beautiful, but I was old enough by then to know not to believe it anymore.

There is always the rest of the story, right? Even if you don't know right now what it is.

And to know me, as you have discovered, is to love me.

Okay, I said, what's your biggest fear? As always, he took a second to think about the answer. Clowns, he said. Clowns. Yup. I just looked at him. What? he said, glancing over at me. That is not a real answer, I told him. Says who? Says me. I meant a real fear, like of failure, of death, of regret. Like that. Something that keeps you awake nights, questioning your very existence. He thought for a second. Clowns.

At every wedding someone stays home.

Maybe my sister and I shared more than we thought. We were both waiting and wishing for something we couldn't completely control: I wanted to be alone, and she the total opposite. It was weird, really, to have something so contrary in common. But at least it was something.

But something, somehow, had made all these paths converge. You couldn't find it on a checklist, or work it into the equation. It just happened.

Sitting there, watching my sister, I wondered which was harder, in the end. The act of telling, or who you told it to. Or maybe if, when you finally got itout, the story was really all that mattered.

If you were dead, Owen told her, you'd have bigger problems than what you were wearing.

You didn't have to take a punch for me, you know,' he said. 'I'm a lover, not a fighter.' 'You're a freak is what you are,' I said. He stuck out his hand. 'Come on, slugger. Walk with me. You know you want to.' And the thing was, despite everything I knew-that it was a mistake, that he was different from the others-I did. How he knew that, I had no idea. But I got up and did it anyway.

This is personal, she'd said. Real. This moment was too, even if you couldn't see it at first glance. It was fake on the outside, but so true within. You only had to look, really look to tell.

It was so easy to disown what you couldn't recognize, to keep yourself apart from things that were foreign and unsettling

Everything in life had its phases, and if you were smart, you learned to appreciate them all. What really mattered, though, were the people in those moments with you. Memories are what we have and what we keep, and I held mine close. The ones I knew well, like a night on the beach with a boy who would always live in my heart, and the ones yet to come with another.

What is family? They were the people who claimed you. In good, in bad, in parts or in whole, they were the ones who showed up, who stayed there, regardless.

Like no longer having something could be a good thing, and the proof of it as well. I was used to the opposite, when absence equaled heartbreak.

I don't believe in failure," she was saying in that confident, breezy way. "Because simply by saying you've failed, you've admitted you attempted. And anyone who attempts is not a failure. Those who truly fail in my eyes are the ones who never try at all. The ones who sit on the couch and whine and moan and wait for the world to change for them." – Kiki Sparks

But even more so, it reminded me that this was all really happening. Stanford. The end of the summer. The beginning of my real life. It was no longer just creeping up, peeking over the horizon, but instead lingering in plain sight.

I felt something catch in my throat, a sudden surge of sadness that caught me unaware, almost taking my breath away. That was the thing. You never got used to it, the idea of something being gone. Just when you think it's reconciled, accepted, someone points it out to you and it just hits you all over again, that shocking.

I was in shock. Funny how the world works. You don't get the something you really covet, but then the universe provides unexpected compensation. Here I thought you had to make a wish for it to come true.